Document Engineering was RE: Way OT: Adam Smith and Software Markets

["Robert C. Leif" <rleif@rleif.com>]

Since DTDs do not have the virtue of readability, their use precludes
extending FrameMaker and integrating other XML applications. I might note
the DTDs from other sources that had been validated by XMLSpy could not be
imported into FrameMaker. Although FrameMaker has much better numbering than
Word, FrameMaker has not split a prefix, such as "Figure" from the number
that follows. This makes it impossible to label Figure captions as Figure 1
etc and to describe a range of Figures by a cross-reference, such as
"Figures 1 to 3".
Another way of stating this is Document Engineering should be a branch of
Software Engineering. I might note that a common editor for text and source
code with bidirectional hyperlinks would be of use for software development.
This capability is included in the XML specifications.
Bob Leif

-----Original Message-----
From: Georg Bauhaus [mailto:sb463ba@d2-hrz.uni-duisburg.de] 
Sent: Tuesday, March 04, 2003 12:00 PM
To: comp.lang.ada@ada.eu.org
Subject: Re: Way OT: Adam Smith and Software Markets

Robert C. Leif <rleif@rleif.com> wrote:
: FrameMaker has the advantages of good numbering, stable paragraph formats,
: and image placement, Adobe has made the incredible mistake of basing it on
: XML DTDs instead of Schemas.

DTDs provide, and have provided for many many year, the most
adequate way of defining a grammar for _text_ with a structure,
and more.  FrameMaker is for text with a structure, and more.

What sort of information would you want to add to what is
possible with "convention-less" DTDs for text? Namespaces? According
to Goldfarb and Prescod the namespace discussion has been going
on for 30 years.